Helen Joy George - Yellow Tulips: one womans quest for hope and healing in the darkness of bipolar disorder

I am in awe of you.

This book contains stories relating to suicide, violence, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, and cutting.

While the author has taken great lengths to ensure the subject matter is dealt with in a compassionate and respectful manner, it may be troubling for some readers.

Contents

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a

typewriter and bleed. Ernest Hemingway

This book lived inside of me. I sat down, and bit by bit it poured onto my paper, sometimes so furiously that I dont recall writing it at all. Now that it is all out, I feel like I can breathe again.

For as long as I can remember, Ive always wanted to write a memoir. As a little girl, I used to lie in the grass and look up into the blue sky and dream of one day writing about my crazy life, because even back then I knew there was something special about it. I was going to name the book The Gypsy Mobile, referencing the gypsy lifestyle my family lived. I gathered stories as a young child and kept them close to my heart like cherished possessions. These memories are heartbreaking, hilarious, and magical. Some are utterly un-believable. It wasnt until I was thirty-one that I felt that my stories were ready to be born, when I was just emerging from a year of fighting for my life in the mental health care system.

Throughout this book, I tell stories of my childhood, my first love, my teenage marriage, my rough start into motherhood, and my descent into the darkness of mental illness. Several names have been changed and a few threads pulled from the tapestry of my life to protect the identities of the brave and the stories that are not mine to tell.

The stories in this book are frozen in time. Many situa-tions no longer exist, many relationships have changed. But this is how it was when it happened.

I wrote this book to heal my broken heart. I wrote it to laugh. I wrote it to help others understand what its like to live with mental illness. But mostly, I wrote it because I was longing for beauty and hope to arise. And once I wrote it all down, they did.

PART One

Dad

He smelled like concrete and Old Spice. His tattered work clothes were always covered in a thin layer of grime, but I thought he was the most handsome man Id ever seen. Rugged. Hardy. His red curly hair was always playfully tousled, coming down over his eye, as if he were perpetually winking. His nose was covered in freckles, which is something he passed down to memy inheritance of sorts. He gave me something else besides the freckles. Whenever you looked into his pale, blue eyes, you could sense longing and sadness. I feel it in every photograph Ive seen of him. I have it too.

One of the most legendary stories Ive heard about my father was when, at age fifteen, he got so angry with his parents that he tried to paddle his surfboard from the shoreline of Sullivans Island, South Carolina, near his home, miles out to a cargo ship heading to Africa. He made it onto the ship, and while he didnt make it to Africa, he landed in the pages of the Charleston Post and Courier the following day: Young Surfer Rescued. When my grandfather passed away fifty years later, I received a box of newspaper clippings. I discovered that my dads ocean-deep resolve enabled him to accomplish some impressive things. The following year, Dad decided to shirk all of his high school sports, grow out his hair, and become the best surfer in the Southeast. He made and kept a vow to surf every day for 365 days and ended up winning the state championship five times in a row.

I used to watch him surf, and I would feel so happy. His eyes gazed at the horizon, his body relaxed as he was gently soothed by the rocking waves he let pass. It was the only place I ever saw peace in him.

In the South, and in the church, we were taught that men held all the authority in a household. When I was tiny, Mama taught me about the authority hierarchy: God is in charge of Daddy, Daddy is in charge of Mommy, Mommy is in charge of you, she said, as we pasted together a mobile to illustrate the idea.